On Target

“No, but—”

“Me either. Pick one of the horses. We need to get moving.”

She looked at the bearded American for several seconds. “But these men. What if no one comes by before nightfall? There are wild animals out here. These are human beings, Six. You can’t just leave them behind to die.”

“Watch me. Get on a horse. I’d like to take the camel, he won’t need water like a horse will, but if we encounter another Janjaweed gang out in the desert, we’re gonna want the speed of horses to get away from them.” He pulled two turbans from the heads of two of the dead horsemen and tucked them into the belt he’d just scavenged.

Ellen shouted angrily, “We take these two men with us, or I don’t go, Six. That is absolutely final!”

Gentry ignored her, kept speaking, more to himself than to the woman. “Camels are actually very fast, but if you don’t know how to handle one, and I don’t, it’s easy to lose—”

“Listen to me! They need a hospital!”

Court stopped talking and looked over the wounded men. “More like a morgue.”

“They are alive! And I am not going anywhere without them!”

Now his eyes turned to the shouting woman. He sighed. “Seriously?”

“Seriously. We can’t just leave two living men out here in the desert.” One of the wounded groaned softly.

Court’s jaw fixed, jutted forward a bit as he stared at the Canadian lawyer. He nodded, lifted the rifle hanging from his neck, causing the woman to flinch in fear. With no hesitation at all, he turned and shot the two wounded men, once each in the chest. Their torsos jerked violently with the impacts, dark blood rooster-tailed a foot into the air above them, and both men stilled instantly.

After the report from the second round died off in the desert, Gentry let his rifle hang by its sling in front of him. “Problem solved. Let’s go.”

Ellen Walsh’s face whitened with horror, then seconds later it reddened with rage. She charged the American. He walked away from her, heading for one of the horses, but she grabbed him by the back of his T-shirt, literally spinning him around. He did not make eye contact with her; instead, he continued marching forward alongside the burning truck.

“You bastard! You are no better than them!” she berated as she ran alongside, trying to get in front of him.

“They’re dead; I’m alive. I’d say I am doin’ a lot better.” He said it mirthlessly, continuing forward. But she finally made it in front of him, put her hand on his chest. Her small sunburned fingers clenched his sweat-drenched brown T-shirt. With his free left hand Gentry snatched her hand, spun it backwards into a wristlock, and pushed her back, away from him. He angrily raised the butt of the AK towards her with his free hand as if he were going to slam it into her face.

Ellen was unafraid; her rage had pushed her past concern for her own personal well-being. “Ah, you beat women, too, do you? You fucking animal! Executing wounded men! Picking over dead bodies like a vulture! Blowing up—”

“How the fuck were we going to haul them across thirty miles of desert? They would have bled out anyway, and we would have died trying.”

“We could have carried them on the horses!”

“And moved at half speed! You want to be out here at nightfall?”

“Don’t make excuses! Just admit it, you wanted to kill them!”

He lowered the gun and let go of her hand. “I’ll admit this. I don’t give a fuck about those two guys, about the bodies lying around here. Other than Bishara, I could not care less.”

She looked over the bodies, back up to him. “What? What are you?”

“I’m whatever you want me to be. The son of a bitch who shoots the wounded, or the guy who’s pulled your ass out of the fire more times in the past eighteen hours than I’d like to remember,” he said, climbing into the saddle of a large gray Arabian mare. “I can get you out of this alive, but you have to let me do my job.”

“Your job is to shoot injured men?”

“Not if I can help it, but we needed to go, and wasting those two shitheads was a means to that end. I could have waited thirty minutes for them to die on their own, but I didn’t want to wait. I could have left them behind, knowing that if the Janjas came back and one of them had enough strength to point which direction we took off in, it could get us killed, but I didn’t want to do that either. Do you even know what these fuckers do? They rape and slaughter defenseless women, they burn children alive in fire pits in front of their parents for shits and grins. Four hundred thousand dead. Is that just a fucking number to you? You can cry for the Janjaweed if that makes you feel self-righteous, but I won’t bat an eye after shooting the killers of women and children.”

She stared at him a long time. Tears streamed down a face still wild with fury and hatred. Clean lines in the caked dust on her cheeks. She said, “Okay, they are killers of women and children; I understand that. But what does this make you?”

Court slid the AK into a strap on the rear of the saddle, then tightened his grip on the big mare’s reins. He looked down at Ellen Walsh and kicked the animal’s haunches. The horse was already galloping towards the east when he answered her.

“I am a killer of men.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

Thirty minutes later Ellen Walsh and Court Gentry were a mile north of the desert track to Dirra, heading east through a narrow canyon that ran parallel to the distant road. Walsh’s chestnut mare had nearly bucked her twice; it was accustomed to a heavier hand controlling the bridle. Gentry deftly led his horse, and he led the way without speaking.

He felt the fury of the woman behind him, sensed the hating eyes burrowing into his back like the scorching heat of the sun’s rays. Off and on she would speak, continuing to berate him. “You are a war criminal now. You realize that, don’t you? And the fact that you executed two wounded prisoners right in front of an ICC investigator leads me to wonder what you do when no one is around to hold you accountable for your crimes.”

Court looked deep into the afternoon haze, searching for any stationary or slowly moving dust clouds ahead, telltale signs of approaching horses. He did see dust clouds here and there, but they moved quickly across the landscape, indicating they were caused by the wind and not hooves or feet or tires.

“I came to the Sudan to help bring a wanted man to justice. But you know what? I ran into someone else, someone who maybe isn’t as dangerous, scale-wise, as President Abboud, but someone with just as little regard for human life. That’s you, Six. I’m going to make sure you are brought to justice for what happened today.”

He turned his horse a little towards the north now. The path he was on led back closer to what passed for a road out here, and he wanted to stay out of sight of any passing traffic. “Do you ever take a break?” Court mumbled it to himself. The way forward, out of the canyon and back into the scrubland of the Sahel, looked clear, for now. He spoke louder. “You know what killed them? You killed them. You not doing what I told you to do. Out here, if you want to live, you do what I say. If I’m on trial in Winnipeg or wherever the fuck, I will listen to you, but out here, in enemy territory? You listen to me.”

Apparently his remark caught her off guard, so accustomed she had become to his ignoring her.

It took her a while to respond, and even then, her words seemed ineffectual. “I am not a trial lawyer. And I’m from Vancouver.”

Court did not reply, just looked ahead, scanning for threats.

“How can you do it? How can you kill like that?”

“Training.”

“Military training?”

He did not answer.

“I need to know who you are,” she said. He could hear the wheels turning in her head. He was now the subject of her investigation.

“No, you don’t.”